A solo home run: The Slurve is trying to build an authentic, profitable business around email

Found via Abnormal Returns. I think there are some good investment-related newsletters out there, but it seems there is still room for some additional high quality ones to come in at some point. If you know of any good ones that I may be missing, send me an email and let me know about them (valueinvestingworld@gmail.com).

The daily baseball newsletter cuts through the endless sea of sports online. Can email newsletters be to the 2010s a bit of what blogs were to the 2000s?

Right up there with “kill your darlings” and “write what you know” is the classic advice to write for just one person. Kurt Vonnegut called this the “secret of artistic unity.” He believed that “every successful creative person creates with an audience of one in mind.”

Maybe that’s part of why email newsletters — email! 1993 technology! — seem to have lost none of their power in our increasingly nichified media world. Why settle for hyper-targeted coverage that caters to millennials nostalgic for Dawson’s Creek who may or may not see your work, for example, when you can deliver content to an audience of individuals who feel like you’re writing directly to them, right in their inbox?

Small-batch newsletters may be a throwback to a simpler Internet — surely that’s part of the appeal — but they still work.

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A newsletter is a branding device, a distribution mechanism — and perhaps even a viable source of revenue.

That’s what Michael Brendan Dougherty is banking on. After political reporting and editing stints at The American Conservative and Business Insider, he decided to quit his job and launch The Slurve, a daily baseball newsletter that began last March on the eve of the 2013 baseball season.

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“A great newsletter has the personality of an email from a friend and the professionalism of a magazine,”  Dougherty says. “And newsletters are like the oldest format on the Internet in a way, but it has so many virtues.”

For Dougherty, starting a newsletter wasn’t a way to send readers back to the homepage of a larger website; the newsletter in and of itself is the product. That’s by design: It also means the newsletter is the central editorial focus rather than a bland afterthought of copied-and-pasted headlines, the strategy that makes so many news organizations’ daily emails feel a half-step away from spam.

“Originally, I wanted to do it as a blog,” he said. “I tried it and I found it was really hard to get an audience and to fill up enough content for a functioning must-view blog site. You had to be doing it as if it were broadcast all day.”

Instead, Dougherty obsessively tracks the outcome of each day’s baseball games and scours the Internet for quality content. (Dougherty says he drew on his own experience receiving newsletters like The Transom.) The Slurve is delivered seven days a week around 10 a.m., and starts with top news. (An opener from last week: “The big story from the fields last night is that the Cardinals have taken sole possession of first place in the highly entertaining NL Central race.”)

The Slurve also includes box scores and links to recaps from the previous day’s games, injury updates, baseball trivia, and a roundup of the best baseball news and writing from around the Internet. “There’s never been so much good writing about baseball as there is now, but it’s also buried under so much junk,” he says. “I go through an unbelievable stack [of content] and I pick out stories or articles that are provocative that carry a real piece of information. I pick out about 130 to 140 of them every morning. The amount of information is just endless.” (That sample issue linked above features 149 links and over 2,700 words.)

Dougherty also includes a handful of links that aren’t about baseball, which gives readers a sense of his personality, sets the tone for the newsletter, and offers clues as to the kind of audience he’s writing for. (Some of the recent stories he’s shared have to do with Ron Burgundy, Breaking Bad, pizza, and science fiction.)

A subscription costs $4 a month or $36 annually, and Dougherty says he’s already a significant way toward building a full-time income. He won’t say how many subscribers he has, except to say that he’s very pleased with growth since the beginning of the season. “Any one of my customers can fire me any day, but the vast majority of them are sticking with me so far,” he says.